More Concertina

Greg's Wargaming Blog shows an easier method for making larger scale concertina wire obstacles.

Concertina Wire

Armored Ink has a nice article on building concertina wire obstacles.

New Terrain Guy Sale

Speak of the devil, and he doth appear. The Terrain Guy blasted out a new e-mail about a straight 20% sale, although only on selected products. Looks like he is now an MBA retailer, with much of his stock at 20% off. Not bad, although I wasn't crazy about the 15mm MBA townhouses I bought from WarWeb. However, his wonderful hills are on sale, too...also, although not on sale, he has now included nicely thin 6mm roads...

New Terrain Guy Terrain

The Terrain Guy recently ran a summer sale which amounted to about 20% off. Actually, it was $20 off of a $100 order. What this amounted to was me making sure my order exceeded $100 by as little as possible-- I'm sure he would have made more money had it been a straight 20% off. Let that be a lesson to you retailers. Anyway, I have been really pleased with his terrain mat and hills, so this time I went for roads, fields and hedges. Overall, I'm pretty pleased, although not quite bowled over like I was with the mat and hills.

Battlefront, bah!

I've got my Flames of War Pak 40s out on the table and have slowly been poking at them a bit. This guy was a little irritating-- he has half a shell, inserting the round into the breech. Only, he's like a scale foot too high. Considering the fact that I could have bought nice Old Glory figures for about 1/3rd of the cost of these, it's something I don't really think I should have to deal with. I think I can work with it by sanding the base a bit, bending the angle down slightly, and putting the gun up on blocks before texturing the base. I had already decided to go Old Glory for transports; sounds like I will for guns, too!

Priorities for the rest of the year

I've been thinking for a while that 2010 was definitely going to be the year of World War 2 for me. I'm pulled by a few other interests, but not strongly enough to really shake that direction. I have a sense of what I want to accomplish before the end of year. Priorities for the rest of 2010 are thus, in rough order:

Trounced By Children

I had been threatening to run a Flames of War game for my son, pictured left. He's kind of lukewarm about the idea, but he had a friend spend the night. This friend is very interested in World War 2, so I whipped up a 600 point game of panzergrenadiers vs. US airborne with some Shermans. Too be fair, I wasn't really playing to win, but I also wasn't playing to lose by the margin I did! They whupped me badly. Just look at those Shermans burn... They enjoyed the game all the more for it, of course. Hopefully my son will get more interested in playing miniatures games with his ol' Dad.

Mickey Doggie

We have a new member of our household, a two year old rescued Miniature Schnauzer named Mickey, or Mickey Doggie as my two year old is calling him. After a difficult few days at first, he seems to be settling in extremely well with the family. He gets along really well with the kids and is generally very well behaved, although I'm not used to having such an energetic dog!

Old Glory CD-363 Panzer III E

Hoody hoo! I'm back on the paint wagon after having to take some time of for family issues. Here you see my six new Panzer III Ausf. Es. The hatches on these were a complete bitch-- not too hard to glue open with the commander in the hatch, but basically impossible to model closed. The rear is sculpted round and irregularly, making it exceedingly difficult to fit into the hatch and glue flat. "Screw it," I said, and just left the hatches off. Also, I have photographed one of these bad boys with their puny cousin, the Panzer I Ausf. A.

Old Glory CD-319A Panzer IB

And here's the last of the early war panzers I have completed to date, the Panzer I Ausf. B, the I A's big brother. That takes me halfway through the 24 early war panzers I am currently planning on-- six Pz Is and six Pz IIs. And now I'm off to work on Panzer IIIs...

Old Glory CD-319 Panzer IA

Working backwards now, I finished up three Panzer I As. Nice little tanks, not a whole lot larger than my car. And not a whole lot more effective in combat, too! Well, maybe I shouldn't be too hard on the little guys-- here is one with a bunch of British POWs.

Ouch, look at the metal I left showing at the bottom of the bodies! That's where glue was holding them onto a stick for handling while painting. Never even saw it-- of course, until I post for everybody else to see. It's always something...

Old Glory CD-320A Panzer II C/A

Painted up some more Panzer IIs, hopefully this time a more correct model number. I'm guessing this denotes the Pz IIc through A? Kind of hard to coordinate the Old Glory product names, which lack capitalization anywhere I've looked, and the Panzer models a-c and A-C and more. Anyway, this is close enough for me right now.

Had a nice surprise when I went to take these pictures! A while back, I sat down with my camera, worked through all the settings to get some good pictures I was finally happy with, and saved them. Tonight, all the settings were blown away, forcing me to start from scratch again! It took me a bit, but I think I finally got everything back. Probably a good thing to force me to do it every now and then so that I somewhat remember what the heck I'm really doing...